What was your best memory from this year/ever?

[miketwalker]

I just wanted to see some of the interesting things people did this year and since they've been in FIRST. Personally, this year so many crazy things happened. The scariest thing that happened was just watching our autonomous work beautiful on the practice field at UCF Thursday Evening, and watch the tether cable get kinked. Then it rips the tether system out of the RC. It scared me so much, I thought we wouldn't be able to run the next day. Thanks to a loaner, we kinda worked though

[Koko Ed]

My favorite moment from this year cam eon the second day at Buckeye. Ken Whitlief led a vigorous cheer between four of the Rochester teams who were sitting close to each other. Blue Lightning and the X-Cats would scream "Rochester!!!" and The visioneers and Sparx would scream "New York!!!" and they kept it up for about five minutes. As a matter of fact all of the Rochester teams were quite noisy all day long. Runner ups were Laini organising the Rochester cheer down by the field using the letters and Sparx, Blue Lightning, the Visioneers and the X-Cats making noise in the front end of the arena before they let us in.
Fun times.

[Chris Nowak]

Originally posted by miketwalker
I just wanted to see some of the interesting things people did this year and since they've been in FIRST. Personally, this year so many crazy things happened. The scariest thing that happened was just watching our autonomous work beautiful on the practice field at UCF Thursday Evening, and watch the tether cable get kinked. Then it rips the tether system out of the RC. It scared me so much, I thought we wouldn't be able to run the next day. Thanks to a loaner, we kinda worked though

yeah, thats why you never tighten the tether down...I think if we had had our tether tightened down this might have happened to us this year.

[miketwalker]

Originally posted by Chris Nowak
yeah, thats why you never tighten the tether down...I think if we had had our tether tightened down this might have happened to us this year.

We had 18 feet of slack lol, but one of the connectors between 2 of the 6 foot cables got stuck in the ramp mesh, and got caught and we couldnt shut it off in time to stop that from pullin it out.

[Kyle]

This year at Philly, MOE was sitting in the spot that the camera man was shooting during the awards and when the camera was pointed to watch the teams accept their awards you could see MOE in the stands so someone on my team(Carlo) decided it would be funny to dance for the camera, so we did. there was about 20 MOE people all spinning to the right for one shot. the next we would spin to the left. than we would wave our arms back and forth, the best was when half of the people doing in would bob-down while the other half stayed up and vise-versa, it was great, the camera man finally caught on and moved so you couldn't see us dance anymore, but it was great while it lasted

one of the best team jokes this year :"I build robots...does that turn you on?"-Carlo at the ice skating rink to the girl at the desk

Oh i almost forgot, in Philly at 30th street train station some of us went there for lunch on Thursday and we brought some buttons with us.. every place we stopped in that station someone working at the store or whatnot had a button on, even the SWAT guy with the bomb sniffing dog had one on, hehehe that took 5 Min's to get him to wear that on his arm, those are some of my bet memories..... good times, there are so many more stories but i would be typing forever

[J2Kraatz]

My best memory would have to be the last night in the hotel because that is when all the ford teams who stayed at the Best western said our goodbyes. That was very touching and I want to thank all those who made it possiable for us rookies to have the time of our lifes.

[Pin Man]

In New Hampshire the funniest yet scariest thing happened during the competition... We just got our arm to work in auto mode... It would swing unbelievably fast at the stack but we tried to fix it to make it take out more stacks but what happened was it swung the opposite way... IT ALMOST TOOK OUT DEAN AND A JUDGE!!! We were so relieved that we missed them...

[sanddrag]

We haven't really had a problem with tethers thanks in part to our long serial cables.

Many of my memories are a blur but I'd say the best was the last match of the LA regional where we pushed our opponent off in the last second to win the match. We did lose for QP's though, but anyone who saw it can't say it wasn't one of the greatest matches ever.

The second best memory is when our other driver MO ran on to the field in the middle of a match to turn the robot on (Phoenix Practice)

[Marygrace]

My favorite memory from this year was...hmmm....well.....i had a blast when i took my first ride on our homemade cart. You see, this year we were trying to custom build a cart to carry our robot around. Ummm, it didn't work out that well. It was to fast and really hard to turn. It wasn't practical for the competitions but a blast to ride around on! When i rode it it was a motor in front, a seat, a steering arm and a frame...that is all. I guess you had to be there...it was really fun!!!

Here is what it looks like, Tyler is sitting on the back, Armin is working on something and Ashton is behond him. It was a blast!

http://www.bcrobotics.org/20022003/images/robotcart.jpg

Many of my memories are a blur but I'd say the best was the last match of the LA regional where we pushed our opponent off in the last second to win the match. We did lose for QP's though, but anyone who saw it can't say it wasn't one of the greatest matches ever.

We were allianced with Sanddrag, that game was great! To bad our robot was touching you guys and still touching the ramp, actually the ramp was touching us, but that is a completely different story. Anyway, this whole year was one big memory that i will never forget and can't wait till next year!

[Kyle]

another great memory is when someone(Hazmat) from my team and my self wanted to hang one of or teams huge banners, but since no one was allowed to go up past the 100 level, we really wanted to hang our banner so thanks to some people from team 25 we found a way to get past the guards that were guarding the doors to get to the elevators, we had another person from our team walk up to the door, than walk away like he was going to find another door and the guard followed him and we ran through the door, and got to the elevator, the guy running it didn't care that we wanted to go up, once we got off on the 200 level we had to climb over lots of seats and rails and stuff to get to where we wanted to hang the banner. when we got it hung someone from our tea yelled up to us that security was waiting for us so we went to find another way down, we walked until we found the back ramp back down to the 100 level, when we walked through the doors another guard asked us why we came through those doors and i said just joking that we were looking for the astrodome(since we were coming from the upper part of the reliant stadium i thought the guy would see right through that line) and he said oh you guys are in the wrong part, you need to go down those stairs and pointed down the hall.

about 20min later the banner had to be taken down by some other people on my team.

that is something i wont forget for along time

[Matt Attallah]

Getting a picture and signature by Dean and Woodie!!

[WakeZero]

My rookie year in FIRST was in 2000, my Sophomore year of High School. During the award ceremonies, I happened to make the comment, "If I ever start a team, I want that award" when the Rookie All-Star award was handed out

To my surprise, I did end up starting a team with some other great FIRSTers here at U of A. Even more to my surprise was when we won the Rookie-All star award at the AZ regional. This would have to be my favorite memory, especially when our most wonderful students told us, "We did it for you". I couldn't help myself, I balled like a baby

I ended up being teary eyed again when we talked to our hero's Mike Rush and Rob M, because it was them who we learned to be such great mentors. They shed tears too

[OneAngryDaisy]

Originally posted by Kyle
another great memory is when someone(Hazmat) from my team and my self wanted to hang one of or teams huge banners, but since no one was allowed to go up past the 100 level, we really wanted to hang our banner so thanks to some people from team 25 we found a way to get past the guards that were guarding the doors to get to the elevators, we had another person from our team walk up to the door, than walk away like he was going to find another door and the guard followed him and we ran through the door, and got to the elevator, the guy running it didn't care that we wanted to go up, once we got off on the 200 level we had to climb over lots of seats and rails and stuff to get to where we wanted to hang the banner. when we got it hung someone from our tea yelled up to us that security was waiting for us so we went to find another way down, we walked until we found the back ramp back down to the 100 level, when we walked through the doors another guard asked us why we came through those doors and i said just joking that we were looking for the astrodome(since we were coming from the upper part of the reliant stadium i thought the guy would see right through that line) and he said oh you guys are in the wrong part, you need to go down those stairs and pointed down the hall.

about 20min later the banner had to be taken down by some other people on my team.

that is something i wont forget for along time

Yea I got ticked that we weren't allowed to go to the top level.. so I found this one lady and started chatting her up with hopes that she'd let me go up for a minute to videotape..

She told me that the reason we couldn't go up was because FIRST hadn't rented the upper levels.. So I asked her how much it would cost for me to rent the top level for 30 seconds and pulled out my wallet (wink wink).. She laughed but wouldn't let me go up..

[Redhead Jokes]

To my surprise Andrew was driving the robot at Phoenix regional. Afterwards he came rushing to the bleachers to share with me, "That was the coolest thing I've EVER done in my life!!!" He went on to excitedly talk about how he'd probably damaged their robot. I said, "Cool! Now go and apologize and offer to help!" He did, and came back to share that with me too.

His astonishment, excitement, new enthusiasm for the program, the look on his face, and sharing it with me. Very cool! THEN understanding about GP - good stuff!

[Amanda Morrison]

Seeing 461 win the Chairman's in Evanston was probably one of the greatest moments of competition I've seen this year. I was so excited for them!